Life and death surround a young Haitian girl

A portrait of Haiti derived from facts alone would be grim. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, suffers from catastrophic deforestation and is frequently visited by the United States military. In 2010, an earthquake added insult to perennial injury.Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, Claire of the Sea Light, offers a somewhat different picture. Deforestation rates a mention....

Danticat's story of family and loss

<b>Danticat's story of family and loss</b> Family can be inscrutable, a mystery sometimes better solved by describing events than by analyzing motives. Edwidge Danticat (<i>Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Dew Breaker</i>) describes her family history in <b>Brother, I'm Dying</b> with a dispassion that only adds to the drama of childhood memories and snippets of...

A murderer's tale of redemption

<B>A murderer's tale of redemption</B> Though published in the year of Haiti's bicentennial, Edwidge Danticat's <B>The Dew Breaker</B> is certainly not a celebratory book. The novel is structured as interconnected stories and centers on a dew breaker or, in Haitian Creole, a <I>shoukÂt laroze</I> the name for a torturer during the brutal regimes of FranÂois...

Adolescent tales of immigration

In classrooms across the country, children and teens who are newcomers to the U.S. struggle to assimilate. In the process, the richness of their own experience is often devalued; their stories, lost. Edwidge Danticat's first novel for young adults represents the initial entry in an admirable new series from Scholastic Books called First Person Fiction, in which notable authors from various...

New series pairs authors and destinationsm

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don't miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: The ruminative. The idea is to pair a litterateur with...

In a talk Edwidge Danticat gave in January, she commented, It's often thought that poor people have no interior lives, and later, I always tell people to fill in the silence that bothers them. Thus, it's fitting that Danticat's newest novel, The Farming of Bones, set in 1937 during a bloody border uprising between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, begins inside the dreams of Amabelle Desir, and...